# POD: Predictive Object Detection with Single-Frame FMCW LiDAR Point Cloud

Source: [POD: Predictive Object Detection with Single-Frame FMCW LiDAR Point Cloud](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa77da1e209131cea7592b>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-26T04:27:29.052Z

Authors: Yining Shi, Kun Jiang, Xin Zhao, Kangan Qian, Chuchu Xie, Tuopu Wen, Mengmeng Yang, Diange Yang

Published: 2025-04-08T03:53:28.000Z

## Abstract

LiDAR-based 3D object detection is a fundamental task in the field of autonomous driving. This paper explores the unique advantage of Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) LiDAR in autonomous perception. Given a single frame FMCW point cloud with radial velocity measurements, we expect that our object detector can detect the short-term future locations of objects using only the current frame sensor data and demonstrate a fast ability to respond to intermediate danger. To achieve this, we extend the standard object detection task to a novel task named predictive object detection (POD), which aims to predict the short-term future location and dimensions of objects based solely on current observations. Typically, a motion prediction task requires historical sensor information to process the temporal contexts of each object, while our detector's avoidance of multi-frame historical information enables a much faster response time to potential dangers. The core advantage of FMCW LiDAR lies in the radial velocity associated with every reflected point. We propose a novel POD framework, the core idea of which is to generate a virtual future point using a ray casting mechanism, create virtual two-frame point clouds with the current and virtual future frames, and encode these two-frame voxel features with a sparse 4D encoder. Subsequently, the 4D voxel features are separated by temporal indices and remapped into two Bird's Eye View (BEV) features: one decoded for standard current frame object detection and the other for future predictive object detection. Extensive experiments on our in-house dataset demonstrate the state-of-the-art standard and predictive detection performance of the proposed POD framework.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.05649>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.05649.pdf>)
